Industry expert Arno Meijroos, recently took the opportunity to attend a presentation where FSLogix addressed the challenges surrounding Cached Exchange Mode (CEM) in Outlook and offered up a unique solution in our Office 365 Container for Citrix product. Issues surrounding Cached Exchange Mode in Outlook have always been present for virtual environments. With the introduction and hyper adoption of Microsoft’s Office 365, these issues are bubbling to the surface at an alarming rate. While there are a few ‘workarounds’ in the wild, their success is typically shaky at best and often times are not suitable for achieving an acceptable user experience.
In a stateless (or non-persistent) desktop, the enablement of CEM means the .OST file is re-downloaded every time you log in to a new session. For most, this is simply not a realistic option. Very small environments can get away with workarounds such as redirecting the .OST file to a network drive, but for large scale Enterprise deployments this is not a supported solution.
The reason for this is the high network and storage performance impact, as the amount of IOPS needed for the file server will increase because the number of read/writes actions to the .OST file for each user will be significant. Due to the large amount of read/writes, there’s also the chance for .OST file corruption.
Arno breaks this article down into the components listed below in order to provide a step-by-step guideline for implementation. He outlines the underlying challenges surrounding Office 365 and addresses the ease of simplicity and the benefits of implementing FSLogix Office 365 Containers.
- Cached Exchange Mode
- Stateless Virtual Workspace Sessions
- FSLogix Office 365 Container
- Install FSLogix Agent
- FSLogix GPO Settings
- Office 365 Container Logs
In summary, Arno concludes that, “The FSLogix 365 Container is a very easy-to-use solution for solving the Cached Exchange Mode problem for stateless virtual workspace sessions. It will work perfectly together with an already existing UEM solution. Implementation is simple; just install the Agent in your Gold Image, configure the GPO settings and start testing!”
Read the full article here to learn how to achieve high performing virtual workspace environments using Cached Exchange Mode while reducing network and storage overhead and user logon times.
